Cloudera bags $160m from Google Ventures and Mike Dell

Top investors pile in to big data funding round

Cloudy startup Cloudera has raised $160m from top investors including T Rowe Price and Google Ventures in its latest funding round to expand further into the big data market.

"Cloudera will use the funding to further drive the enterprise adoption of and innovation in Hadoop and promote the enterprise data hub (EDH) market, support geographic expansion into Europe and Asia, expand its services and support capabilities and scale the field and engineering organisations," the firm said in a statement.

Other investors in the round include MSD Capital, the private investment arm of Dell founder Michael Dell and his family. The new investment puts Cloudera's total venture funding so far at around $300m.

Cloudera makes and distributes one of several kinds of Apache Hadoop, the open-source big-data file store first developed by Yahoo! from a paper by Google. The other distributors include MapReduce and HortonWorks, which have both hinted at the possibility of going public, Intel, IBM and a joint venture between EMC and VMWare called Pivotal.

Originally built for computer scientists, Hadoop has started to move into the corporate world but companies need firms like Cloudera to help them manage their data through the software system.

"This round of funding validates the mainstream adoption of Hadoop among enterprises today and Cloudera's leadership in what many believe is the most important technology sea change in the data center for the next decade - the move to Hadoop for storing, processing and analysing the vast quantities of data commonly referred to as big data," the firm said. ®